The Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution had a massive impact on China from 1965
to 1968. The Cultural Revolution is the name given to Mao’s
attempt to reassert his beliefs in China. Mao had been less than a
dynamic leader from the late 1950’s on, and feared others in the
party might be taking on a leading role that weakened his power
within the party and the country. This probably explains the
Cultural Revolution – it was an attempt by Mao to re-impose his
authority on the party and therefore the country.
The movement began in September 1965 with a speech by Lin
Piao who urged pupils in schools and colleges to return to the
basic principles of the revolutionary movement. Chinese youths
were also encouraged to openly criticise the liberals in the Chinese
Communist Party and those apparently influenced by Nikita
Khruschev of the USSR. Educational establishments were
considered to be too academic and, therefore, too elitist.
Mao believed that the progress China had made since 1949 had
lead to a privileged class developing – engineers, scientists,
factory managers etc. Mao also believed that these people were
acquiring too much power at his expense. Mao was concerned that
a new class of mandarins was emerging in China who had no idea
about the lifestyle of the normal person in China.
Red Guards (groups of youths who banded themselves together)
encouraged all the youth in China to criticise those who Mao
deemed untrustworthy with regards to the direction he wanted
China to take. No-one was safe from criticism: writers, economists
and anyone associated with the man Mao considered his main
rival – Liu Shao-chi. Anyone who was deemed to have developed
a superior attitude was considered an enemy of the party and
people.
Mao deliberately set out to create a cult for himself and to purge
the Chinese Communist Party of anyone who did not fully support
Mao. His main selling point was a desire to create a China which
had peasants, workers and educated people working together –
no-one was better than anyone else and all working for the good of
China – a classless society.
However, the enthusiasm of the Red Guards nearly pushed China
into social turmoil. Schools and colleges were closed and the
economy started to suffer. Groups of Red Guards fought Red
Guards as each separate unit believed that it knew best how China
should proceed. In some areas the activities of the Red Guard got
out of hand. They turned their anger on foreigners and foreign
embassies got attacked. The British Embassy was burned down
completely.
The looming chaos was only checked when Zhou Enlai urged for a
return to normality. He had been one of the leading members of
the Chinese Communist Party to encourage all party members to
submit themselves to criticism but he quickly realised that the
experiment that was the Cultural Revolution had got out of hand
and was spiralling out of control.
In October 1968, Liu Shao-chi was expelled from the party and this
is generally seen by historians as the end of the Cultural
Revolution. Mao had witnessed the removal of a potential rival in
the party and therefore saw no need for the Cultural Revolution to
continue.
Dancing for Mao
The "loyalty dance" was a fixture of China's Cultural Revolution, and Kang Wenjie's
performance at a giant Maoist teach-in was boffo.
Li Zhensheng / Contact Press Images
Li Zhensheng heard singing followed by a burst of applause. Following
the sounds led the photojournalist to a young girl with unusually fair
hair tied in ponytails, dancing with her arms upraised and surrounded
by smiling, clapping soldiers.
They were at the Red Guard Stadium in Harbin, in northern China,
along with hundreds of thousands of Communist Party cadres, workers,
peasants and other soldiers who had gathered for a marathon
conference on the teachings of Chairman Mao Zedong. This was 1968,
nearly two years into the Cultural Revolution, Mao's attempt to purge
Chinese society of supposed bourgeois elements and escalate his own
cult of personality. The conferees seemed to be trying to outdo one
another in their professions of love for their nation's leader.
On April 28, the last day of the 23-day gathering, a 5-year-old
kindergartner was performing the "loyalty dance," as it was known. In
front of the soldiers in the stadium stands, she skipped in place and
sang:
No matter how close our parents are to us, they are
not as close as
our relationship with Mao
How absurd, thought Li, who was then a photographer for the
Heilongjiang Daily, a party newspaper. The girl certainly was lovely and
eager to please, but the photojournalist found the excess of zeal
discomforting. "They had to love him to the extreme," says Li, now 68
and retired.
In the cult of Mao, everyone was expected to perform the loyalty
dance—from miners to office workers to toddlers to old ladies whose
feet had been bound. "The movements were always toward the sky—that
way you could show how respectful you were to Mao," Li says.
"Everyone knew how to dance it."
Li shot six photographs of the scene, of which the Heilongjiang Daily
published two. When the girl—instantly known as "Little Yellow Hair"—
returned home to Dedu County (now Wudalianchi City), people came to
the roadside to cheer her for bringing fame and honor to their town.
Li kept on taking pictures—including those he called his "negative
negatives": Red Guards shaving the head of a provincial governor
because his hairline was too similar to Mao's; security forces shooting,
point-blank, two accused counterrevolutionaries for publishing a flier
the government deemed too pro-Soviet. These were scenes that China
did not want the rest of the world—or, for that matter, its own people—
to see.
In the darkroom, Li would separate potentially dangerous negatives and
hide them in his desk. When the time seemed right he would take them
home for safer keeping, having cut a hiding space the size of a book in
the floorboards of his one-room apartment.
Even after the Cultural Revolution effectively ended with Mao's death,
at age 82, in 1976, Li was wary about showing his more incendiary work.
In 1980 he left the newspaper to teach at Beijing University's
International Political Science Institute. In 1988, the organizers of a
nationwide pho-tography competition—what Li says was China's first
such undertaking as it opened up to the outside world—encouraged him
to enter some of his pictures.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Indelible-Images-Dancing-forMao.html#ixzz2BPP68oHo
Then-Defense Minister Zhang Aiping, who had been imprisoned for
years during the Cultural Revolution, greeted the exhibition with the
remark, "Let history tell the future." Li's pictures (which did not include
"Little Yellow Hair") won the grand prize.
"The authorities were shocked by the violence depicted in Li's images of
public humiliations inflicted upon dignitaries and by the photographs of
the executions," says Robert Pledge, co-founder of New York City photo
agency Contact Press Images, which would collaborate with Li in
publishing his life's work in the book Red-Color News Soldier. (Images
from the book have been shown in ten countries, with exhibits
scheduled for Hungary, Australia and Singapore later this year.)
For his part, Li says he remained haunted by the people in his
photographs. He wanted to know what had become of those who had
survived; he wanted to connect with the families of those who hadn't. In
1998, he wrote an article for his former newspaper under the headline,
"Where Are You, Little Girl Who Performed the Loyalty Dance?"
A week later, he heard from Kang Wenjie.
Kang still lived in Wudalianchi City, not far from the Russian border.
She made a living selling wholesale clothes to Russian traders. She was
married and had a 12-year-old son.
Kang told Li she had been picked to represent her city those many years
ago because she could sing and dance, but she hadn't even known that
the dance she performed that day had a name. After Li told her about it,
she used the very word in her reaction that he had thought in 1968: ke
xiao—absurd. "I was merely a naive child who knew nothing," Kang,
now 46, says today. "How could I become that well known after a
dance?"
Li says the story reminds him of the fable of the naked emperor's new
clothes—here was a child who couldn't even read Mao's writings being
held up as a model of Maoist thought. "During the Cultural Revolution,"
Li says, "no one dared to tell the truth."
Even today, the truth about those dark days remains a delicate subject.
Li's book has been published in six languages, but it is not available in
China.
Jennifer Lin covered China from 1996 to 1999 for the Philadelphia
Inquirer, where she remains a reporter.
A TRUE STORY OF COURAGE AND HOPE
SCARF GIRL
REVOLUTION **
RED
** A MEMOIR OF THE CULTURAL
by Ji-li Jiang Published by HarperCollins
This award-winning memoir of a shattered childhood recalls a
haunting time which chills the soul. At almost every turn, we listen
to the heart-pounding struggle of a little girl, and her struggle
between her belief in Chairman Mao and the Communist Party,
and her beloved family. Writing with powerful simplicity and
unblinking understatement, Ji-li makes the Cultural Revolution
meaningful to children as well as adults. Red Scarf Girl stands
beside The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary, and forever
changes the way we see the world and ourselves.
In 1966, Ji-li Jiang was twelve years old. An outstanding student
and leader in her school, she had everything: brains, ability, the
admiration of her peers – and a shining future in Chairman Mao’s
New China. But all that changed with the advent of the Cultural
Revolution, when intelligence became a crime and a wealthy
family background invited persecution or worse. For the next few
years Li-li and her family were humiliated and reviled by their
former friends, neighbours, and colleagues and lived in constant
terror of arrest. At last, with the detention of her father, Ji-li was
faced with the most dreadful decision of her life: denounce him
and break with her family, or effuse to testify and sacrifice her
future in her beloved Communist Party. Told with simplicity,
innocence, and grace, this unforgettable memoir gives a child’s
eye view of a terrifying time in twentieth-century history – and of
one family’s indomitable courage under fire.